Loophole

Slavery was abolished in America at the end of the Civil War, with the 13th Amendment to the Constitution:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The amendment passed Congress in January of 1865 and after much debate it finally passed the Senate in December of that year. As has been pointed out by many, it has a loophole: slavery as a punishment for crime. The American prison system houses a disproportionately large number of African Americans and it exploits inmates to this day by forcing them to do unpaid labor, or by paying them so little — ten cents an hour — that it might as well be nothing.

The roads of history can be long and winding, but the connections they create between places and people are never boring.

From the beginning of the United States, from even before the Constitutional Convention in 1787 (where the Constitution was written) there was friction between the slave-breeding states Virginia and — to a smaller degree — Maryland on one side, and the African-slave-importing South Carolina and — to a smaller degree — Georgia on the other. Eventually the slave-breeding states won.

WTF! you say? Slave-breedingstates? Yes, I’m sorry to have to put it like that, but for the South slavery was a business, the main business, from the beginning of the British colonies to the end of the Civil War in 1865. To try to put it more delicately would be to obfuscate matters. It was what it was. People were used for unpaid labor, they were used as currency, as debt collateral, as investment, as a means to acquire free land, as political clout — both on the individual and on the state level, they were used for medical experiments, they were sex slaves and they were bodies designated for the creation of more slaves. It was horrible, disgusting, America’s original and most vile, most capitalist sin.

Yes, Virginia was a slave state, but it didn’t become a true slave-breeding state until the import of African enslaved people was prohibited, officially in 1808, but in reality earlier in most places due to fear of bloody uprisings like the one in Saint Domingue (now Haiti) that started in 1791 and resulted in a free and independent Haiti in 1804. Before it became the sole provider of slaves for the rest of America — along with Maryland to a lesser degree — Virginia already grew tobacco, which was a relatively easy crop and seasonal, so slaves didn’t die in large numbers from the work, and in the off-season there were plenty of other tasks to be done; thus Virginia diversified somewhat compared to the deep South.

The Deep Southern states grew sugar cane, rice and cotton, which were brutal crops.

Sugar cane because it was seasonal and dangerous — the cane was harvested with large knives but no protective gear, there were lots of snakes, and the processing involved large fires and hot liquid in small, often wooden buildings. Most importantly, the planters figured that it was cheaper to work a few slaves to death during the sugar season and buy new ones the next season than to have to treat them well enough that they survived and had to be fed and clothed and housed during the off-season, when there wasn’t much else for them to do since the Deep Southern plantations weren’t diversified.

Rice was brutal because it grew in water, which bred mosquitos, leading to mosquito-born illnesses, and it required large numbers of slaves, who were housed in the smallest possible spaces, so epidemics were common.

Cotton was brutal because it hurt to pick cotton from the hard and prickly bolls, the bags got heavy — around 200 pounds at the end of the day — and the enslaved workers were whipped in the field if they accidentally broke a twig, because a boll on a broken twig will not bloom during the next season.

Of course, on any plantation, the overseers were savage goons; the job description didn’t exactly attract amicable types. The overseers on cotton plantations, for instance, had quotas, and anyone who didn’t meet the quota at the end of the day, when the cotton was weighed, was usually whipped. And the quotas kept going up…

Also, fear of uprisings led planters to work their enslaved people harder than necessary just to keep them exhausted. So, even though more efficient agricultural equipment was being invented all the time — the Industrial Revolution was full on, after all — planters preferred to have their slaves do everything manually.

Anyway, long story short: the Deep South had a negative slave population growth due to the circumstances the enslaved had to endure, while the Upper South, especially Virginia, had a positive slave population growth, which meant they were perfectly positioned to develop slave breeding as a profitable business. And that they did. From 1810 — just after the door permanently closed on the African slave trade, predominantly to Charleston, South Carolina — to 1860, almost 450,000 people were sold from Virginia into the Deep South.

More on the breeding side of things in a later post, though.

Slave trading had been a business since the beginning; interstate traders either bought slaves from Virginia and sold them further south or bought them from South Carolina, where they arrived in Charleston from Africa, and then sold them further west. At times more enslaved people would be bought in Charleston and at others in Virginia, depending on various circumstances. One of them was that South Carolina would import more or less slaves from Africa, depending on the availability and the demand, much like the Saudis do nowadays with oil, which would infuriate the Virginians. Once the African trade was prohibited, Virginia and Maryland were the exclusive sources for slaves for the rest of the South.

At first the interstate slave trade was a one-man business, with a few assistants to keep the enslaved people in line en route. Literally. Over land slaves were walked in coffles, or chain gangs — groups of people chained together. Pretty soon the slave trade from Virginia and Maryland to the Deep South expanded and became concentrated in a few cities. Alexandria, Virginia was perfectly situated on the Potomac, across from Washington DC and close to Maryland. Richmond also became a major collection point for slaves bred locally in Virginia and for coffles to Natchez, Mississippi. Baltimore, Maryland had its port and ship building industry, which made it the obvious collection point for shipping slaves down around Florida to the Gulf of Mexico and New Orleans. And it had packet boats — boats with regular schedules (once every two months) — which could be relied on for timely delivery down south.

Slave traders grew their businesses and took on agents on the buying end, in the slave-breeding states. At first they would stay at an inn; later they would establish offices. They placed advertisements in the local papers announcing they were interested in buying slaves. The inns at first obligingly reserved special rooms to keep the enslaved, and soon small, secure sheds, until eventually someone would build a slave jail, also called a slave pen — for profit, of course. So the inn keeper, the jailor and the town (through fees and taxes) all made money from the slave trade. The agents would scour the countryside of Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky for slaves for sale and bring them to their collection points. When they had enough for a coffle, they would walk them to a slave jail in Richmond or Baltimore, where they would stay, sometimes up to four months, until the agent had acquired enough slaves for a boatload or an overland coffle.

From 1828 to 1837 the biggest slave traders in US history, Franklin and Armfield, did their business out of Alexandria and Baltimore. Isaac Franklin (1789 – 1846) was a big-picture guy; he orchestrated the logistics and the banking side of the business from Tennessee.

In the summers Franklin and Armfield took overland coffles from Richmond down to Natchez, Mississippi, sometimes counting as many as three hundred enslaved people, the biggest on record. It was a long, hot trip, two to four months, and more than a thousand miles — the men sometimes with iron shackles around their waists, their hands cuffed behind their backs, other times with their wrists linked to one another, most if not all barefoot, the women and children following behind, sometimes linked with rope. Each night any of the women could expect to be taken to the woods by the trader or his overseers to be raped. Here and there along the way, on stretches where towns were non-existent, “stands” sprung up, kind of like truck stops, but for traders and their coffles — another business that flourished thanks to the slave traders. This article gives a good idea of these hellacious experiences.

On the shipping side of things in Baltimore, Franklin and Armfield set up their own packet lines, custom-built the boats for slave transport and ran them more often — every two weeks instead of every two months. They also transported slaves for other traders, who thus subsidized their shipping costs. The boats were sail-steam hybrids; sail for the sea and steam for up the Mississippi. All this made their business faster, with slaves spending less time languishing in jails and on boats on the smallest rations possible, so less enslaved people arrived at their destination dead.

Isaac Franklin ran the business on a national scale like it had never been done before; it was in every way a modern business.

A note on the enslaved who didn’t make it to their destinations: the slave traders were hated by the locals in their ports of call. Aha, finally some morality! you think? No. The traders were a nuisance because they would throw their dead in the marshes rather than spend money to have them buried, and the stink was overpowering throughout the town. Often the townspeople didn’t dare drink the water anymore. In 1833 Isaac Franklin dumped the bodies of several enslaved persons who had died from cholera in a bayou in Natchez. It caused a panic and as a result several towns issued an ordinance banning long-distance traders from selling their slaves within the city limits.

Once in Natchez, or Louisville, Kentucky, Franklin would take the slaves that he hadn’t sold yet the rest of the way by steamboat down to New Orleans. Louisiana had a law that children under ten were not to be separated from their mothers. In 1829 Franklin arrived in New Orleans with a group of 110 enslaved people, many of them children, and of the children a suspiciously high number were aged ten. So most of them were probably younger, but it’s not like anyone could prove their age, or was actually interested, other than the children and their mothers, of course, but their opinion on the matter was irrelevant.

Having arrived in the Deep South, Franklin and other traders advertised their enslaved people as “Virginia negroes” or “Virginia and Maryland negroes”. It was kind of a brand, indicating relative docility and good health compared to slaves whose backs were a road map of lash scars, which indicated that they had worked on a Southern plantation and were therefore already not in the best of health anymore, and that they might be prone to insubordination.

Along the way, the traders pimped out their female slaves or kept them for their personal pleasure. Slave traders were notorious for having multiple sex slaves. In letters to another business partner, Isaac Franklin regularly mentioned “fancy girls” — very young girls, lighter-skinned, doomed to a life of sheer hell, who were usually “broken in” by the traders on the way to their destinations — and at one time he brainstormed about having two of their older enslaved women run a brothel, either in New Orleans, Baltimore or Alexandria, for the benefit of the company and its clients.

So, all in all it’s not surprising that slave traders were looked down upon by polite society, even while polite society prospered in large part thanks to their services. Franklin became filthy rich but that meant nothing since he was a slave trader. So in 1830 he bought two thousand acres outside of Gallatin, Tennessee, his hometown, and began building his estate Fairvue. Or rather, his enslaved workers built it. No expenses spared; he even built brick slave houses! When it was finished in 1832, people said his place was even grander than General Andrew Jackson’s! In 1835 Isaac Franklin left the slave business. Well, he stopped personally driving coffles, anyway.

Instead of a slave trader who raped young girls and dumped corpses into the bayous, he now presented himself as a respectable, slave-owning gentleman. He still dealt in slaves, but now in the rich planters’ way. Enslaved people were collateral for mortgages and Franklin became a predatory lender. He acquired tens of thousands of acres of land this way, including three existing plantations and quite some undeveloped land in Louisiana. He started spending his winters there and built up the plantations, bought more slaves and started developing the new land as a fourth plantation, which he called Angola.

Franklin died in 1846 on one of his Louisiana plantations, probably of cholera. He was the richest man in Tennessee and probably in the whole South. At the time of his death his estate was worth at least $750,000, which would be around $24 billion in today’s money.

His Tennessee plantation Fairvue is still a residence. In 1977 it became a National Historic Landmark, but in 2005 the National Parks Service withdrew the designation. It’s surrounded by an expensive subdivision with a golf course, club house, the works. Franklin had planned to give each of his three daughters one of his Louisiana plantations, but none of them lived to adulthood. He had a child by an enslaved woman, but it’s unknown what became of him or her (sources conflict as to gender).

The plantations eventually went to the state of Louisiana, which ran them with convict labor during the last part of the 19th century, and since 1901 officially as a state penitentiary, an agricultural prison still called Angola. Nowadays it has around 6300 inmates, almost 75% of whom are black, and about 72% of whom are in for life without the possibility of parole. It’s a plantation run by convict labor, also known as slave labor. Among other work, the inmates pick cotton, by hand.

Sources:

The American Slave Coast : A History of the Slave-breeding Industry / Ned and Constance Sublette

You bet. Yes, the reason they shy away from it is because of the school boards. and the school boards, in the biggest states anyway, also have a big influence on what goes in the school textbooks. This is only going to change if school boards are either abandoned or they have a rule that they don’t interfere with the curriculum and leave that up to the professionals in the fields in question.

I have serious doubts that leaving it up to the proffessionals will help much.
In the USA people who hold the positions in which one woudl expect to be held by a proffessional are often littel more than politcal hacks. The USA is not the Netherlands or Germany. Remember this is the place that the Police have let people out of jail so that they couild be murdered.
IN the field of history for example AMerican historians have not even figured out the Roosevelt, Churchhill, Marshall, Montgomery, and Eisenhower deliberately prolonged the war in Europe, which resulted in millions of deaths. to allow the Gemans time to kill more Soviet citizens. I have gone in to greater detail about this at other sites. I do not feel like going in to it now.

I am rather surprised that a normal person such as yourself is glad that the second world war prolonged unneccessarily. Of course you are aware that thousands of people, more than usual, died per day during this period.

Of course the allied leadership did not do this because they thought that the Soviet Union was a conspriacy. No they had other very obvious reasons for doing it.
Anyways even if they did not think that the Soviet Union was a conspiracy it is kind of silly to reject all conspiracy theories because they describe a CONSPIRACY.
That is as foolish as acceptiing the idea that the WTC was brought down by a controlled demolition when even though it looked like a controled demolition one can easily explain why the collapse looked like a controled demolition and one can easliy explain that since it would have been really really hard to set up such a controlled demolition before hand one should really not accept the idea of a controlled demolition for what we all saw. No a thinking person will be much more discernng and accept those conspiray theories that make sense. Of course for a conspiracy theory to make sense to any particular person that person has to have the training and expierience to to properly weigh the evidence that they are confronted with.
But just imagine this, if Germany had actually won the war and I were to make the statement that Hitler conspired with his government ministers to start a general European war I would now be accused of being an unpatriotic lunatic conspiracy theorist. I am also sure that you can imagine that if, under this regime, I were to say the Jews of Europe were systematically murdered during the 1940s I might be arrested by Erdogan for libeling the Turkish state and people. But NO, you do not have to imagine that BECAUSE YOU SAW IT FOR YOURSELF. To refresh you memory it was that documentary made with Rutger Hauer in 1994 called Morgenland if my memory is correct.

I have not seen that documentary. For the rest, I don’t really know where to start, Curt, other than that I of course am nnot happy that the war was prolonged. I’m not happy that there was a war at all. The reasons I suspect it’s a conspiracy theory that the Allies purposely prolonged the war so that the Germans could kill more Russians are 1: a few less Russians would not have done anything to change or destroy the Soviet Union, 2: the Allies would not want to have more of their own people killed unnecessarily, and 3: if the war was indeed prolonged by the Allies for the reason you mention, quite a lot of top dogs would have been in on it and you can’t keep something that big a secret for over 75 years.

What Folks Have Been Reading

Archives: The Whole Shebang

Archives: The Whole Shebang

WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING

The Indigenous nations of North America practiced slavery for various reasons, but once the Europeans came, it became commodified in a way that looked a lot more like the human trafficking we know today. The damage it did to the entire continent is mind-boggling.

In the late 60s Richard Proenneke built his own cabin in the Alaskan wilderness with only a few simple tools. He spent most of the rest of his life there. Sam Keith fleshed out Proenneke's diary of his first 16 months, when he was making his home by a lake. I love these kinds of books!

An old Oji-Cree healer and her nephew canoe down a river in Canada, away from the world of white people. They both have to come to terms with their past. The woman has lost most of her tribe and the young man is traumatized from his recent experience in the Belgian trenches of World War One. My second book by Boyden. Can't say enough about him.

An incredibly comprehensive history of everything related to slavery in the Southern United States, from the beginning of the colonies to the end of the Civil War. Over 700 pages and I took over 30 pages of notes. I will be sharing over many posts to come!

Hamid's debut novel. I love this author. A young man in Lahore, Pakistan, is the victim of love, drugs, obsession, the class system and his complete lack of self-awareness.

A golem, created in Poland and brought to life on a ship to America, and a jinni who was trapped in a flask a thousand years ago and released in New York -- the most unusual immigrants you'll ever meet.

The only part of her life a Korean woman can control is her body, so she withdraws into it. Harrowing.

Autobiography lightly disguised as a novel about the son of Southern migrants growing up on the streets of Harlem, New York City, in the 1940s and 50s. Written like you're hearing the whole story in a bar. Quite a feat.

The story of a man struggling to make a living in Morocco. No plot, no clearly defined characters, but fascinating in its authenticity.

Four generations of black women in Louisiana, from a kitchen slave in the 1830s to a 'free' woman during the Jim Crow 1930s. What they had to do to survive, to keep what they could of their family together. Powerful.

Pakistani man tells an American about his experience as a college student and employee of an assessment firm in America years ago. Smart, nuanced and pretty darn honest considering the unreliable narrator.

Wow! The answer to the inane platitudes about how all parents love their children and how children should always respect their parents. The protagonist must come to terms with his deeply flawed immigrant parents in order to change himself.

Seven short stories about life during the Kim Il-sung regime, by a writer who still lives and works in North Korea, were smuggled out of the country and translated. Mind-boggling stuff.

A 15-year-old autistic narrator wants to know who killed a neighbor's dog, and ends up much further out of his comfort zone than he planned. Wonderful read!

In politics, education, religion, agriculture, business--it turns out that dumbing down has been here from the start.

Fifty years of Istanbul seen through the eyes of a street vendor who migrates to the city as a young boy. It's also a window into the complicated dance between men and women in Turkey.

Hey, don't laugh, at least I'm trying.

A Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with six other people on a tiny island off the coast of Maine all winter in 1873. A woman in the present researching the Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with three other people on a tiny sailboat. What could possibly go wrong?

A man stuck between two worlds in more ways than one. Fascinating!

Historical novel about early contacts between first nations and the French in Canada. Beautifully written story that doesn't pull any punches. I bought his other two novels right away.

Beautifully written. By my children's favorite English and Creative Writing teacher! It's got rave reviews and we're all very proud of her.

"What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off. "

Suki Kim is a Korean-American journalist. She poses as an evangelical Christian posing as an English teacher at a school for the sons of North Korea's elite. Her experience and the information she manages to get via writing assignments are incredible. Definitely a lot more eye-opening that any CNN special.

This. Explains. Everything!!!

Why has Islam not undergone a reformation like Christianity? Why is it so easy for Islamic extremist groups like IS to recruit young muslims? What would it take for Islam in fundamentalist Islamic countries to enter modernity? Does the West have a role to play?

Amazing! A man wanders endlessly through a dreamscape, becoming other people, himself in the past, everything is fluid. Kafkaesque disconnect between people and their different needs.

A multi-layered novel about the history of Libya. A fast read, but one you can repeat and find something new each time.

Twelve Americans go missing in Burma/Myanmar during a tour. Touching and hilarious, but mostly hilarious.

The quote on the front mentions that these stories are exhilerating. I couldn't disagree more. They are almost unbearably painful to read, and yet I couldn't put them down. Very well done, apart from the third story, which is written in the second tense. Please let me know if you know of ONE story that works in second tense.